One size fits all: How the “Ethiopian Highlands” made Bale Mountains National Park inscrutable

The categories we use to make sense of a place are never neutral. Scientific classifications can maintain ignorance about some aspects of a landscape, even as they create knowledge about others. This article considers this in the context of Ethiopia's Bale Mountains National Park, a landscape whose hydrologic and socio-cultural characteristics have been made inscrutable through the convergence of imperial legacies, processes of knowledge production, and complex biophysical properties. We use the example to conduct a genealogy of the notion of the “Ethiopian Highlands” and its associated metaphors, tracing the political-economic, biophysical, and epistemic factors by which this category came into use, and how these intersected to maintain a particular yet partial vision of the region. By critically analyzing bibliometric data, historical sources, and chains of reasoning in the scientific literature, we show how a small group of foreign experts erroneously conflated the landscapes, peoples, and environmental concerns of one area with those of another. Together these forces reify imperial gazes, perpetuate degraded wilderness narratives, and overlook significant geologic, (paleo)climatic, sociocultural, and land use differences. The result is a simplistic understanding of a distinct hydrosocial landscape, the perpetuation of conflict and resentment, and poorer conservation outcomes.